Evaluation

In this essay I will evaluate my Creative Media Practice Project which included an audio only project and an experimental film project. I want to discus all the stages of the production process I went through, ups and downs along with achievements and failures. I will talk about what I have learnt and what I wish I knew before I have started. Also I want to touch upon the effectiveness each stage of the production, the final product and how we worked as a team. have influenced my work and how my idea came to live in front of my eyes over a short amount of time.

The audio project has been the first project we have been introduced to. It was a sound scape exercise in which we had to create a sense of place. I believe the purpose of this exercise was to make us aware of how important the sound is in films and how hard it can be to record Foley sound without having the image in front of you, and also teach us the sound recording equipment and software.

The three of us had a library session in which we got together around a table with one of the bigger screens, we researched and exchanged ideas for what the very short brief represented ‘sense of place’. One of my original ideas was to recreate sounds from different planets and have an in depth research how the atmosphere is like on each of the planets in the solar system.  This idea was soon picked apart by our tutor as it had flaws and was very unrealistic as we could not have possibly recreated an atmosphere of all the planets in the short amount of time that we had and the three minutes would have given us about 20 seconds for each planet which is not enough time to represent a sense of place. 

Instead we went with the idea of a mental institute much like the one you see in ‘One flew over the cuckoo’s nest’. I have drawn a plan of the institute to help us plan how we would record our sound and what sounds we needed to put where. We have decided to make it seem as if the person listening to our project is in the space our mentally ill character is in. The journey the character goes on is very short yet it meant a lot to me to create a routine like feeling. He is sitting in front of a window at the beginning, gets up, walks over to take his pills, you can hear the sound of a busy common room in the background. He then walks down the corridor whistling, in this corridor you can hear other patience mumbling and laughing insanely. When the character walks into his own room someone shuts and locks the door behind him. The steps die down and you can hear his heartbeat, water dripping, he sits down on the chair in front of a window and you can see that being alone effects him as the sounds becomes distorted. This idea proved to be effective and it gave us a structure that we needed to be more organised. We have written down a list of sounds we needed to record for the next time we were going to see each other. The pre-production of this part of the project went very smoothly as we were all determined and motivated to make this idea work.

In the experimental film part of this project I found myself to be motivated more then my colleagues. One of our original ideas was to match the sound project and the film and make the sound come to life so to speak but I thought this idea was very weak and as the sound in my opinion is not a strong piece of work it would drag the film down. I have researched into non-linear structure narratives, which fitted my idea of the film, but I have always wanted to play with the concept of pure abstraction in film. Though I do believe I am leaning more towards non-linear structure as the film has a clear voiceover of the first and the last chapter from the Holy Bible, which I have cut into pieces and fitted as much of the footage, I have recorded and gathered over the summer. The idea for this piece came from a late night with the voice of the film Josh Turner during which we picked up a Bible from my friend’s flat and started reading through different chapters. I found that the first chapter ‘Genesis’ which talks about the creation story combined with the last chapter ‘Revelation’ which tells us the tale of how the earth will be destructed by God and his seven angels. I found these two chapters to be very characteristic and interesting. What he created he can destroy, this message I found to be very powerful and I hope it comes across in the film. I was trying to be careful about putting too much dialogue in as it could distract the viewer from images but I believe I have created a good balance because the more frequent the voiceover is the more layers you can see. I have not storyboarded this idea nor have I written a script as I had very little time as both of the team members have had problems with being able to meet me and discuss ideas.

I have called this film Revelation because I believe it is suitable to what this experimental film is about. The two stories from the bible are very rarely linked together and presented against each other which to me is it links to the first definition of the word. And as to the second it links directly. I am a non-believer but I do find that this book is full of very interesting stories and it has a lot of power within its pages.  

The sound project even with everyone’s input and effort didn’t raise to my expectations. I think if we all have spent more time on the production and didn’t leave the post-production process to last minute it would have sounded better. I do believe if we had prior experience with Pro Tools it would have been a lot easier for us to make sense of what was on the time line. If I could make the sound project again I would have gone with a different idea which was simpler and easier to record as I have struggled to get the right floor to record the sound and we all have difficulties with the H4Z zoom and the Marantz as they were very new to us.

I do like the way the film has turned out given the circumstances. When looking and the title sequence I believe I could have put another layer of film into the title but with that said the semi transparent white title, in Arial font makes it subtle yet the audience will be able to remember the name of the film. And I think if I did put a track matte key in Premiere Pro and put another moving image into already very busy space the viewer could pay less attention to the name. The layers and opacity levels were tricky to play with as you can see

on this screen shot of the workspace the most layers I have had at once was 5. One thing I would have changed about this project is the chance to film everything in the period of time that we were given so I didn’t have to use any of the footage from before I have started this semester as I wanted to learn more and progress from what I have already been taught. I am proud of the footage that I have filmed and my original photography yet I am not satisfied. The beach footage is from Bournemouth, the shots of people are from my previous school, the tunnel footage is from Paris and so is the sped up traffic, the nature if from a local park in London where I have lived previously, the fire place is from last year’s Winter Wonderland in London. The three pieces of footage which are not mine are archive footage from a website called ‘Archive.org’ All of them are a type of a film burn or a light .The only shots that I have filmed for this project are the out of focus lights of the streets and the trees outside of city campus. These lights have added depth to the image making it more busy as the voice over moves from Genesis to Revelation you can see the change in editing and layering, I tried to introduce the idea of chaos that the scripture talks about. Overall I believe I have done my best when looking at the production and post-production process as I have done it in 3 days from Friday morning till Sunday evening and the idea for this film came to me on a Thursday night when I was left by one of my team members in the editing suite when we were supposed to talk over the plan of action for this film. If I could do the film again knowing what I know now I would have either tried harder to motivate my team mates to do this film or I would have chosen different people to work with. Also If I was to work with the same idea I would have worked on the sound more as I have not been able to run it through Pro Tools as I run out of time.

The process when working on the mental institute project was very straightforward and during this part of the project each of us had equal input into the finished piece, yet I was left to re-work the sound levels after the critical analysis with Martine. During the research and putting ideas down on the table we all had very strong ideas that we contributed, when finalizing the idea I drew a floor plan of where I would like the character to go which was welcomed by my teammates because it gave us structure. When recording I went to the Workstation near the city campus to record the steps and doors shutting as it had wooden floors and not many people were there after 6 pm. I was then lead to believe me and of my team mates were going to record the rest of the sounds at his accommodation but when I was on my way he changed his plans. This was very frustrating as I was determined to finish all the sounds that evening and I wasn’t able to record any more sounds without his help. Another problem I have encountered is the software we had one session on before having to create this piece of work during which I found the tutor to be going a bit too fast when explaining things to us which resulted in much confusion during the post production process but we have been able to ask other members of our course and were able to edit in Pro Tools. We have had equal opportunity to edit this piece as we all sat together and worked in a team, making sure everyone liked what they could hear. When exporting this piece of work I was the one that stayed behind to export the footage, I have struggled as I had trouble exporting it as a single file but two of my course mates helped me with the settings then burning it onto a disk.

During the experimental project I have came up with an idea in a day that grew on me the more I thought about it. I have recorded the voiceover on Zoom H4n on a Friday morning with Josh and presented about 2:40 minutes of the unfinished film to the tutor by Friday afternoon. I have edited this piece as well as I have shot and found the archive footage I have spoken about earlier. All the footage you can see in this film was filmed on Canon 60D and most of the close-up shots if not all were filmed with a 50mm lens and the out of focus lights that I have managed to film with Hannah on Friday for an hour were filmed using a standard lens. Some of the effects when looking at the lights in this film were purely due to the rain on the lens, when I asked Hannah to use a torch on her phone and shine it into and around the lens the drops of water created an interesting effect. I have edited this project on Premiere Pro CS6, which I have used last year for my final project before coming to university. As I have edited everything on my MacBook Pro I was able to work through the night on Friday and some of the night on Saturday. I enjoyed this process the most as I have had a lot of experience with the software prior to this project making it easier to edit when knowing many of the short cuts. The moral issue I have encountered when editing this project is when I had to use the archive footage to make this film come together as I was not able to burn film nor was I able to film anything like the light you can see through all the shots.

During this project I have learnt that compromise is very key when working in a team of people with very different visions. Also I have been able to learn how to use Pro Tools, Zoom H4n microphone, I have also been able to be more creative on the editing software as I did not have to keep to a structure except the one created by the voice-over. Creatively I have been very happy with the way I have been able to put my ideas on paper and transform them into something visual and pleasing. I have developed team skills along with self-motivation, which was quite difficult at first yet once I have started something the ideas were flowing smoothly. I have also been able to give myself critical feedback and really try to stand back and pick apart my own film and sound piece as I have found it challenging before this project.

I think I worked well in a team for the first part of this project as everyone tried to put equal amount of effort into this task. I have then slowly lost communication with my team as this semester went on which was disappointing because we chose to be in this group. I was the designated director of the film project and I believe I could have done very little more when it came to communicating and motivating the team because when they could not make the time to meet me it was very hard to talk through ideas, research and actually go out and produce a film. I believe I could have made more phone calls and sent more texts to my teammates and try and talk through some of the ideas on Facebook group message.

The Experimental film - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4E-Jr5Otk4